Spanish Holiday Day 15

 Day 15: Hiking in La Garrotxa

We were picked up this morning by our mountain guide for the day, Fermin.  The 1 1/2 hour drive out of Barcelona took us to La Garrotxa Natural Park.  The park is the best example of volcanic terrain on the Iberian Peninsula with over 40 cones in a fairly compact area.  Good for us that the last eruption was a couple of hundred million years ago.

We began our hike in la Fageda den Jorda, a flat walk through a beautiful old beech forest.  

After a couple of miles, the terrain began to become rougher and steeper as we began climbing one of the volcanic cones.  

Along the slope of the cone, the soil was very rich and there were several large farms, stone houses a beautiful stone church.

After a little prodding from Fermin, we decided to hike down into the caldera, a steep narrow path through dense foliage.

At the bottom there was a tiny stone church in the middle of nowhere.  There was slew of people, including many very young children playing and picnicking around the church and we were having a rough time trying to figure out how they negotiated the very difficult trail we had just descended. 

On the way out of the caldera, we found a wide, well maintained trail with a pretty tame slope.  The views of the distant mountains were great, and we were even able to see France (take that, Sara Pailin) from here.

The trail passed an old farmstead where the owner was into producing weird carvings.

After hiking for several hours, we reached a picnic area (with bathrooms, yeah!) and Fermin opened his backpack and produced a huge lunch for us.  We also found out he was carrying 4 liters of water for us (9 lbs of water) not including water for himself.  He was definitely earning his tip.

After lunch, on the return trip, we hiked into another caldera  with interesting lava flow patterns. 

Returning to the car, we had walked about 9 miles with just over a thousand feet of elevation gain.  A good days work.

On the way back to Barcelona, we did a drive by of the medieval town of Sant Pau.

Tonight, we needed to get to bed early.  Pick up tomorrow morning at 4:30 am for a flight north to Bilbao in the Basque region.